John Lewis arrived in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1986, representing an urban Atlanta district that was largely but not exclusively Black. He soon earned a reputation for gravitas and well-deliberated decisions; within a few years he bore the sobriquet “the Conscience of Congress.”

In his wisdom and manner, Lewis could be Solomonic, even saintly. But, as David Greenberg makes plain in his new book, John Lewis: A Life (Simon & Schuster, Oct. 8), Lewis was not without his human shortcomings. Getting to Congress, for example, involved a bruising primary battle with a fellow veteran of the civil rights movement, Julian Bond, who had proved himself a highly effective advocate for his constituency. Bond had also developed a costly and destructive addiction to cocaine, which Lewis didn’t hesitate to exploit in his campaign.

“You could make the argument that it was a legitimate thing to raise,” Greenberg tells Kirkus by telephone during a recent vacation on Cape Cod. “But, you know, a lot of people saw this as John Lewis, the so-called saint, being a political animal like everybody else. He wanted to win, and he resorted to talking about Bond’s drug abuse to do it.”

For another thing, Greenberg observes, there was a time when the entire Black Congressional Caucus was called “the Conscience of Congress.” Lewis eventually assumed the mantle, and even if none of his congressional peers objected openly, there was behind-the-scenes talk that Lewis sought too much of the limelight.

“When he wrote his memoir and ascended to celebrityhood,” says Greenberg, “he left behind the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that he had been a part of. SNCC had always seen itself as a group, not as a bunch of heroic individuals, and they felt that Lewis didn’t fully give credit to them and that maybe he had come to enjoy his fame and celebrity a little too much.”

Not that he didn’t deserve that fame and celebrity, and rare is the idol without feet of clay. Indeed, adds Greenberg, a Rutgers professor of history and journalism whose previous work has often centered on the presidency, it was Lewis’ undeniable stature as “a distinctive figure in our time” that convinced Greenberg that it would be worth the six-odd years he spent working on the biography.

It helped, he admits, that one of Lewis’s late-in-life archenemies came into office at about the time Greenberg was finishing his previous book, The Republic of Spin. “In politics presidents stay within the defensible boundaries of what can be said to be true, even if they’re putting a spin on it. Trump was taking our politics somewhere else. I wanted to get away from all that and from him, since I was spending so much time with him anyway. We all were—on the news, on our homepages, everywhere.”

Watching a palate-cleansing documentary on the late Robert F. Kennedy, Greenberg noticed that Lewis kept appearing onscreen. “I must have known, but I had forgotten,” he says, “that Lewis worked for Bobby Kennedy in the ’68 campaign. And somehow it just occurred to me: I wonder if there’s been a biography about John Lewis?” There were several children’s books, he discovered, but no full biography. “I didn’t quite formulate it this way at the time, but [I positioned him] as an anti-Trump, someone who represented a lot of what has been most noble in our political traditions.”

Lewis grew up on a small farm in segregated Alabama, recalling of his childhood, “The world I lived in was completely Black. I cannot even recall seeing somebody white.” A devout Christian from an early age, Lewis had an informed sense of systemic injustice, and the bookish young man enrolled in the reform-minded American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, where the “social gospel” found adherents among students and faculty.

Steeped in philosophy and history, Lewis seemed to have a promising career as a minister ahead. But then he wrote a letter to Martin Luther King Jr., offering to lead an effort to desegregate a teacher’s college in Montgomery. Because Lewis was underage, he couldn’t file the necessary lawsuit himself, but King and his lieutenants were impressed by Lewis’ commitment. For his part, Lewis said simply, “I love life, but I’m prepared to die if that’s what it takes to bring about true equality in America.”

Lewis showed that bravery many times; says Greenberg, “It was as if fear vacated his body.” Soon after returning to Nashville, he led a sit-in at the downtown Woolworth’s lunch counter, drafting a sermon while enduring the jeers and shoves of rowdy white supremacists. Unnervingly serene and apparently fearless, he endured beatings by civilians and cops alike, his head once broken open by a mob carrying tire irons and baseball bats. Even so, he remained committed to King’s cause of nonviolence—and for that he was sidelined by younger activists who would become increasingly militant in the late ’60s. Lewis had a simple explanation: “I was pious, not hip. I believed in an interracial democracy, and I believed in the beloved community.…I was never used to the sniping that went on, and I couldn’t snipe at Martin King, and I wasn’t in any of the cliques.”

Lewis’ commanding moral authority was second only to King’s, and after King’s assassination Lewis continued to advocate tirelessly for civil rights. He moved between groups and coalitions, building and crossing bridges, forging strategic alliances. When Lewis entered politics at the city level in Atlanta, Greenberg says, he “had an integrationist vision of equality, and he was proud to represent both Black and white and Atlantans of other racial identities.” Many civil rights leaders went on to head universities, foundations, churches, and companies, notes Greenberg, but Lewis took the fight for civil rights to the halls of the Capitol. He retained that integrationist vision even as more divisive political strains emerged, often saying, “No matter what ship your ancestors came over on, we’re all in the same boat here.”

So John Lewis was the “Conscience of Congress” after all, even if the rift with Julian Bond never healed. “He really came to inhabit that nickname, and he worked to be worthy of it,” says Greenberg. For one thing, Lewis never wavered in his commitment to nonviolence. “And it wasn’t just nonviolence as a tactic where getting beat up wins you sympathy from people watching on TV,” Greenberg explains, “but the deep commitment to nonviolence as a way of life, achieving true forgiveness of people who oppressed you and meeting that with love. That was the key to John Lewis’s whole career, and one reason he did achieve that status, that aura, was that people could see that there was a truth to that commitment.”

“Think of it this way,” Greenberg adds. “There are two paths for America to follow. Raphael Warnock, the senator from Georgia, calls the first January 5th, the path of freedom and equality. The other is January 6th. Both Warnock and his fellow Democratic senator from Georgia, Jon Ossoff, were elected that week in 2021. Ossoff was Lewis’s intern. Warnock was Lewis’s pastor. When they were elected together, it’s not too much to say that they both came in on the legacy of John Lewis.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.